It is unlikely that you hear the word “microglia” very often during your classes, and it’s even less likely that you know what it is. The UC Davis Medical Investigation of Neurodevelopmental Disorders, or MIND Institute, studies microglia and has recently discovered a new role they play in our brains’ development. Microglia are a part of the immune system for the body’s central nervous system. They are similar to macrophages (white blood cells) and are the nervous system’s primary defense against infection. Microglia also clear away dead cells and repair damage. “Typically, microglia were thought to be stationary sentinels in the brain and were a part of the immune system,” said Stephen Noctor, an assistant professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at UC Davis and the study’s lead author. In other words, they were believed to be activated only when a problem occurred, but nobody discovered their role in our brains’ development until now. At the MIND Institute, Noctor and his team found that microglia remove healthy... ...

If it ever seems like all the stress in your life may be driving you to the edge, it just might be. Susan Charles, UC Irvine professor of psychology and social behavior, along with her colleagues, conducted a study investigating the long-term effects of minor stress events in people’s lives. “If you were to ask the average educated person today about their physical and mental health … they’ll often mention such behaviors as not smoking, maintaining a balanced diet and exercising regularly, but it is unclear how many people would mention … the need to make sure they are experiencing low levels of stress,” Charles said. Using data from two national surveys, the researchers found that participants’ negative emotional responses to daily stressors predicted psychological distress and self-reported mood disorders 10 years later. Minor stress events or daily stressors studied included getting stuck in traffic, fighting with a friend or significant other, and waiting in long lines. “Stress on a daily basis is detrimental,” said Wesley Moons, an assistant professor... ...

Medical Technology: A 16-year-old in London has recently been fitted with a bionic arm to replace the arm he lost to meningitis as a child. What’s more impressive, however, is that he can control his arm from a smartphone. It runs off a rechargeable battery, and can articulate over 25 common gestures such as shaking hands, pinching and even a trigger motion. The arm is controlled directly via an iPhone or iPad, and after getting over the initial learning curve, has proved to be a life-changing technology. Astronomy: There is a lot of water in Jupiter’s atmosphere, but there wasn’t always. Researchers looking at data from the Herschel Space Observatory have concluded that all the water in Jupiter’s atmosphere was brought there by an asteroid impact that occurred in 1994. While 19 years may seem like a long time to us, in astronomical terms, it is a mere instant. This discovery was only possible due to Herschel’s astounding sensitivity to infrared light, and the ability to distinguish the emission lines... ...

A disturbingly large fraction of Americans are just dying to be skinny, and dying is no mere understatement. The psychological health disorders anorexia and bulimia nervosa are exceedingly prevalent among the U.S. population. Roughly 20 million Americans (about 1 in 15 people) suffer from these diseases, and many more likely go undiagnosed. Combine that with the fact that Davis is a college town, and it’s likely someone has a friend or has personally been affected by such life-changing ailments. Anorexia nervosa is a disorder commonly delineated by an anxious reaction to the presence of food. Oftentimes anorexic individuals, who obsess over maintaining a dangerously low body weight for their height and age, starve themselves and/or participate in excessive exercise routines. Bulimia nervosa is a binge/purge disorder. Someone with bulimia may overeat and force themselves to vomit or compensate for the calories with obsessive exercise. Both of these diseases can detrimentally impact a person’s social, emotional and reproductive well-being; additionally, these disorders are potentially life-threatening. Anorexia and bulimia, which continue to... ...

YouTube, one of Google’s most popular services and the third most popular website worldwide, offers the most features and content of any video sharing website to date. With roughly a billion unique visits every month, the company is constantly upgrading and adding features. Naturally, it is useful to know some of the tips and tricks to help improve your browsing experience. Before watching another video, one of the first options is to opt into the HTML5 beta testing for YouTube. The setting is like a performance boost. This means less time yelling at your computer or complaining about slow internet (especially off-campus) when watching hilarious videos. This option can be enabled by going to youtube.com/HTML5 and joining the beta trials. While many of the videos have already been encoded in this format, videos that contain ads have not yet all been converted. This feature can be enabled natively in the Chrome browser or any browser that supports HTML5, which is just about every browser available on the market. Now that... ...

Editor’s note: This article is part one of two in a series about the human intersection of technology and medicine. Although the body is one single entity, it is one single entity that is far greater than the sum of all of its many interconnected parts. Look at the body as a set of systems — skeletal, neuronal, muscular, digestive, respiratory, circulatory, immune, lymphatic and many many more, all working in concert to make one lean, mean, Call-of-Duty-4-playing yet socially “successful” machine. These systems contain parts, all moving and interacting in ways that modern science is still playing catch-up to understand. While I understand that my head bone is connected to my neck bone, until a few days ago, I had no idea that taking a bite of polar bear liver could make me die of vitamin A poisoning … par exemple. Recently, medical science took a sizable leap forward in regenerative medicine, spurred by a discovery in an unassuming, unexpected field: dermatology. Researchers at UC Davis’ stem cell research... ...

Most people are familiar with the image of corporate America. An image of men in business suits in a very tall building comes to mind. We associate these images with wealth and status, which have always been very important societal values. Wall Street, Fortune 500 companies and other big business, and even many scientific fields all exhibit discrimination characteristic of the glass ceiling. We don’t tend to think about it too often, but I pose the question: Why is it that when we think of wealth and status in regards to careers, women take the backseat? Although corporate businesses have admitted there is still a glass ceiling, you will find that the invisible ceiling is present in more than the corporate world, and science, renowned for prizing facts over bias, is no exception. One may argue that the statistics for women look great right now. More women are attending college than men, and more of these women are moving forward to successful careers than ever before. The recession is finally... ...

Day in and day out, the U.S. population is bombarded with controversial opinions and claims about global warming. As with many mainstream scientific issues that implicate mankind of wrongdoing, there appears to be a split in popular belief. There are even those who simply have no desire to acknowledge different arguments. Some people are of the opinion that global warming is a hoax generated by the scientific community. Others have concluded that global warming is an entirely natural process that the earth experiences in cycles (and is in no way, or is insignificantly influenced, by human action). The third hypothesis is that global warming is a natural process accelerated by man-made industry. By what is a seemingly inevitable process, most people find themselves caught somewhere between these three schools of thought with no idea as to what is fact or fiction. Global warming is literally defined as “the rise in the average temperature of Earth’s atmosphere and oceans.” It is a process that has been observed since the late 19th... ...

Medicine: Medical researchers have recently developed a “nano-sponge” that can enter your bloodstream and soak up deadly bacteria like MRSA that are resistant to conventional antibiotics. The nano-sponge, which measures about 1/300,000th of an inch, is surrounded by a membrane that mimics a red blood cell. The harmful bacteria attach harmlessly to the sponge and then get transported to the liver for removal. The new method was developed at UC San Diego. Physics: The best place to try to figure out the origins of the universe is not on top of a mountain with a telescope; it is deep underground. These caves contain some of the most sensitive scientific instruments ever created and form the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search (CDMS) project. The sensors at CDMS have recently detected three “WIMPs,” or weakly interactive massive particles, that could shed light on the nature of dark matter and the origins of the universe. The CDMS project is located in the Soudan Mine in northern Minnesota. It is a collaborative project between Stanford... ...

You have to give a presentation. Whether it be for class, for work or in a desperate attempt to try to convince your parents of something, presenting an idea can be a daunting task. In such a situation, nearly everyone turns to their trusted friend: PowerPoint. It’s the simple, standard way to organize ideas and ensure that there is a coherent flow to a presentation. Unfortunately, therein lies the problem: nearly everyone chooses it. Put yourself in your professor’s shoes and imagine their excitement level as yet another student loads a PowerPoint presentation — it’s going to be pretty low, and nothing will bring your grade down like putting your professor to sleep. The Solution: Prezi. Prezi is a free, online presentation software that allows you to escape from the one-dimensional timeline format of powerpoint. Prezi allows you to turn your boring timeline presentation into something more like a navigable map that can easily jump between points using visually stimulating transitions. Although it may not sound like a big change,... ...

*Editor’s note: This is a new section of the science page. Every week, we will publish the top seven (according to us) most fascinating science breakthroughs that we don’t have space to write articles about. Health: Sorry guys, size does matter (but not a lot). A recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows that women judge men’s attractiveness based partly on penis size. The best line from the study was, “The penis is not an island.” This means that male physical attractiveness is based on many other factors as well, including body-size, hip-to-shoulder ratio, muscle tone, hair and voice level. I just feel sorry for the 105 women who had to look at slideshows of 343 naked men. Solar System: We might find some form of life on Io, one of Jupiter’s moons. Astronomers recently discovered that the surface of Io is rich in hydrogen peroxide. So, who cares? All life (as we know it) requires water and certain elements like carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus... ...

The Scenario: You’re working on a project within a group, but need to distribute the data to everyone. No one has time to meet up, and the documents and PowerPoints are simply too big to email. Distribution via flash drive would involve everyone meeting up at one point or another, a task made difficult when everyone is too busy. What could you possibly do? The solution? Cloud storage. Cloud storage has become prevalent enough that anyone with access to the internet has probably used it one way or another. The possibilities are endless. As long as you have an internet connection, you can access the cloud and all the data within it. Big-time technology companies such as Google, Apple, Samsung, Amazon and others have all invested in some sort of virtual storage solution for their consumers. The only difficulty for the consumer is figuring out which services are reliable, useful and offer the best quality. Here are a few of the most popular cloud storage services. Dropbox Dropbox is easily... ...

It’s spring in Davis and the student body is abuzz with excitement for the nice weather. Unfortunately, along with the beautiful sunshine comes another, less-loved phenomena: wind. If you’ve been at UC Davis for more than a year, the odds are that you have some sort of story in which the wind has embarrassed you. The wind can be blamed for almost anything from a terrible hair day to physical injury. Stories of the wind blowing people off their bikes are not uncommon. The latter is especially true in the normally hazardous bike circles, where wind adds a new level of difficulty for inexperienced riders who don’t account for the increased resistance and end up poorly executing their overly ambitious moves. According to Kyaw Tha, a professor in the Environmental Science Department at UC Davis, wind is caused when one current of air pushes another out of the way. “Pressure gradients — the change in pressure over distance — power the wind,” said Tha in an email interview. “The greater... ...

*Editor’s note: This is a new section of the science page. Every week, we will publish the top seven (according to us) most fascinating science breakthroughs that we don’t have space to write articles about. A study published last week showed that the fossil-fuel industry has been subsidized by nearly $2 trillion in 2012. Trillion with a “T.” And the United States was responsible for $509 billion of that amount. NASA just released a study showing that nuclear power has prevented more deaths than it has caused. Engineers are upgrading the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) to make it even more powerful. The upgrades will double the strength of the world’s most powerful particle accelerator. They hope to be able to finally produce dark matter. A study released by the American Chemical Society has just shown that solar panels have finally reached the tipping point — that is, they finally produce more energy than it takes to manufacture them. The Los Alamos National Laboratory alleges they have unraveled how HIV attacks... ...

It comes as no surprise that the most common procedure done in veterinary medicine is sterilization in the form of castration. Animal science students are exposed to the procedure fairly early in their undergraduate career, and most likely will be performing the operation themselves after graduating from veterinary school. It is also no surprise that many dogs escape their homes and breed without the owners’ knowledge. The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) is a huge proponent of neutering and spaying as a means of controlling the stray pet population, since some people will dump unwanted litters on the street or take them to a shelter where the animals have little chance of being adopted before they are euthanized. While neutering and spaying are obviously beneficial for controlling stray pet populations, not much is known about how these operations affect the animals themselves. The UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine did a recent study of the effects of neutering in an effort to get the full... ...